Ok, so it’s not every day that you read about a concert from the point of view of one of the band members. My band The Zoas have only been playing a couple of years, but recently we have been hitting the road hard and have been touring round Europe playing in every venue from the dingiest bar cellars, to audiences of a few hundred. It has been a great experience so far, but the one gig that will stay with me the longest is the time we played at Aberdeen.
I think it’s something of a fad these days when unsigned bands like to claim that they are “unique” or sound like “nothing before”, which is of course true. Of course every band is unique, strictly speaking, it doesn’t even need to be said, but what they seem to be implying is that they are revolutionary in terms of pioneering unexplored musical territory. Some of them might be correct, but as you might expect, the majority sound like the rest. And here’s where you groan as you think you know where this is leading. Well, my band, The Zoas, pride ourselves on not claiming to be original at all. All we do is copy Pink Floyd and all the other prog rock bands and update their sound a little. It’s unashamed plagiarism, but we love it and all we want to do is pay homage to our heroes. From the comfort of our Aberdeen city centre hotel, we were really, really counting on the fact that our brand of music was going to go down well with the crowd.
So, the big night came and we were behind the curtains with baited breath. It would have probably been the easiest way out to simply play some Pink Floyd covers and call it a night, but we played out own material. The crowd was great and bought all of our CDs. We are definitely considering coming back to Scotland for next time and will consider booking ourselves into a Strathclyde hotel.
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